Part I: Land and Language 7Culture Areas of Asia
The terms we have been using—South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast
Asia—are fairly recent geopolitical terms that began during World War II and
have come into increasing use in the postcolonial period as modern Asian
nations have formed regional associations for trade and military security rea-
sons (see map I.1). Such maps represent current political alignments, more
than long-term cultural affinities, and lay on desks at the US State Department.
Anthropologists more typically use the concept of “culture area.” Behind
the culture area concept is the assumption of a geographical region with some
degree of environmental unity within which local societies have made similar
cultural adaptations. For instance, humid lowland riverine regions of Southeast
Asia have been cultivated by wet-rice methods that have supported a number of
small states. By contrast, the cooler uplands support much smaller populations
of slash and burn tribal cultivators.
Societies within a single culture area, it is assumed, will share similar polit-
ical, economic, and religious institutions. Thus, in the Indian cultural sphere
we find small, unstable kingdoms where the king models himself after Shiva or
Vishnu, his capital is a replica of Heaven, and the Brahman supports the state
with appropriate sacrifices and interpretation of sacred texts. Society is hierar-
chically organized in a moral order based on elaborate codes of rank and
honor. The state in the Indian cultural sphere often looked like sacred theatre,
as Clifford Geertz describes in a famous study of one of the more byzantine
Indic states, the Balinese:
It was a theatre-state in which the kings and princes were impresarios, the
priests, the directors, the peasantry, the supporting cast, stage crew, and
audience. The stupendous cremations, teeth-filings, temple dedications, the
pilgrimages and blood sacrifices, mobilizing hundreds, even thousands of
people and great quantities of wealth, were not means to political ends,
they were ends themselves, they were what the state was for. Court
ceremonialism was the driving force of state politics. Mass ritual was not a
device to shore up the state; the state was a device for the enactment of
mass ritual. To govern was not so much to choose as to perform.
Ceremony was not form but substance. Power served pomp, not pomp
power. (Geertz 1980:13)
In the Chinese cultural sphere, by contrast, we find a striving toward per-
fect centralization and the realization of Confucian norms of the state-as-fam-
ily. There is a secular quality to the state not seen in the Indian cultural sphere.
The state is a problem in management, and bureaucratic machinery has been
elaborated to facilitate its effective operation. Scholarship was similarly practi-
cal, unlike in India, where books explored metaphysics, the nature of the soul,
the doings of the gods, the conduct of rituals, but rarely applied itself to practi-
cal matters of governing. You search in vain in India for a historical textual
account of the day-to-day workings of a given king; in China, such state